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Art

The National Museum of American History is not an art museum. But works of art fill its collections and testify to the vital place of art in everyday American life. The ceramics collections hold hundreds of examples of American and European art glass and pottery. Fashion sketches, illustrations, and prints are part of the costume collections. Donations from ethnic and cultural communities include many homemade religious ornaments, paintings, and figures. The Harry T Peters "America on Stone" collection alone comprises some 1,700 color prints of scenes from the 1800s. The National Quilt Collection is art on fabric. And the tools of artists and artisans are part of the Museum's collections, too, in the form of printing plates, woodblock tools, photographic equipment, and potters' stamps, kilns, and wheels.

Sixteen-year-old Gerome Ferris etched this print in 1879 after his own painting of the dying Christopher Columbus, 1506 Last Days of C. Columbus at Vallodolid. The current location of the painting is unknown, but the choice of topic anticipates Gerome’s future as a history painter, focusing on American narrative subjects.

After death, Christopher Columbus’s journeys were not over. His remains traveled from Vallodolid to Seville and in 1542 were taken to the island of Hispaniola, now Haiti and the Dominican Republic, colonized by Columbus after 1492. After a move to Havana, Cuba, they returned to Seville cathedral in 1898 where they are today.

The etching was printed on chine-collé, a very thin sheet of paper that accepts the image in passing through the press with a heavier sheet of backing paper to which is it glued during the printing.

Were it not identified as a brewery on Girard Avenue in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the building in this unsigned 1879 watercolor and pencil study could easily be mistaken for one of Stephen Ferris’s Moorish subjects from his trip to southern Spain in 1881. There are two more watercolor studies of the brewery; see: GA*14546 and GA*14547.

Stephen Ferris made his sketch in a class at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1879. (His son Gerome had been enrolled at the Academy since 1878). On the verso there is an outline sketch of bare- breasted woman with large necklace and long hair, holding a bowl on her left hip with cup raised in right hand.

Stephen Ferris etched a dapper J. L. Gérôme (1824–1904) in 1899, near the end of Gérôme’s very successful career as painter and sculptor. Ferris had admired the French artist’s work for many years, at least since 1863 when he named his son after him. Although Ferris never actually met Gérôme, the two artists had corresponded. For this print Ferris used a photograph he had received from Gérôme. He then sent Gérôme trial proofs for comments and requested a signature to include in the final impressions, which appears here at lower left.

Gérôme congratulated Ferris on the portrait as “work done with great care and great talent—the effect is very good and very firm. If I had any criticism to make, I would reserve it for the background, which is a little too even, and for the clothing, which has a little softness in the execution.” Gérôme also suggested that the highlight on the order which appears on his left breast and is not particularly noticeable in the photograph, be less bright. The order remains brightly lit, possibly Ferris’s tribute to Gérôme.

This profile portrait of Spanish painter and graphic artist Mariano Fortuny is one of two in the NMAH collection that Stephen Ferris made in 1875, soon after Fortuny’s untimely death at age thirty-six in Rome, Italy, on November 21, 1874.

Gerome Ferris, in a note on the mount, refers to the print as an etching on glass. According to a contemporary, Stephen Ferris “was one of the first artists to practice etching on glass as it was miscalled at the time.” The cliché-verre process, as it known today, originated in France in the nineteenth century. The artist coats a glass plate with an opaque substance and then draws an image on it with a pointed instrument such as an etching needle. He then lays the plate image-side down on a sheet of photosensitized paper and exposes it to light.

This print and a second portrait of Fortuny by Ferris were the only two American etched portraits shown in the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition. The revival of interest in etching that began in Europe during the 1860s did not really take off in the United States until about 1880, but visitors to the exhibition saw a modest number of American etchings at the beginning of the movement.

The signed watercolor is one of three in the Ferris Collection in which Stephen Ferris depicted the brewery on Girard Avenue in Philadelphia. The similarity of the building to Moorish architecture probably appealed to the artist, who was very interested in that subject. However buildings in the pencil sketch at upper right look more like Philadelphia. See also GA*14540 and GA*14547.

The signed and dated watercolor of a Philadelphia brewery was made eight years after an earlier dated view in the Ferris Collection. No doubt Ferris was returning to a favorite subject. See GA*14546 and GA*14540.

The pen and ink portrait, signed and dated 1882, shows a man who might be North African, perhaps someone Ferris sketched on his trip to North Africa and Spain in 1881 and worked up later when he returned to Philadelphia.